9/16/07

Hello -

I had a riding lesson on September 16th.

The arena was under construction (piles of dirt in random places and a tractor in the arena,) so we went on trail rides instead.

I rode Pete, an oldish white horse who's pretty good. When he's on the ground, he seems kind of restless and doesn't like to sit still, but he's good when he's being ridden. He's fine in the crossties, but once he's out of the crossties, he starts walking and moving around. Since we were going on a trail ride, me and another girl who's in my class got on our horses and walked over to the side to wait for our teacher. Pete walked around and if I pulled back on the reins he would go backward and then when I stopped pulling back, he walked forward. He's a funny old guy!

On the trail rides we jumped and walked, trotted, and cantered and it was a lot of fun. On a wider part of the trail when we were going to start cantering, Pete cantered and tried to get in front of my teacher on her horse. We had to stop cantering.

It's fun to jump on him, although I'm not sure I'm doing it totally right. He's funny when he jumps sometimes, because occasionally he'll jump higher than he needs to to get over the jump which surprises me. It's probably a good thing, so that he won't hurt himself, but it surprises me.

I love horse back riding! : )
Kaminsky